Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Our oil-based food system will run out of gas one day
Shawn Dell Joyce, Copley News
When you hear the words “peak oil,” the first thing that springs to mind is the long lines at the gas pump during the ’70s energy crisis. However, the continual decrease in the world’s oil reserves will more likely result in longer bread lines than gas lines.
Collectively, we Americans eat almost as much fossil fuels as we burn in our automobiles. American agriculture directly accounts for 17 percent of our energy use, or the equivalent of 400 gallons of oil consumed by every man, woman and child per year according to 1994 statistics.
How did this come about?
Shawn Dell Joyce is an award-winning sustainability expert and artist who lives in a green home in the Hudson River Valley region of New York.
(21 November 2007)
A cause to diet for
Gordon Cairns, The Guardian
Tea, coffee, wine and soya are off the menu but cabbage pie is on as residents in the ancient kingdom of Fife take part in an experiment to reduce their carbon footprint by eating only local produce. By Gordon Cairns
—
Catherine Lindow and Richard Brewster, from the rural Scottish town of Kinghorn, this week sat down with their two children to a beef pie made with cabbage, leek and potato. The night before, they dined on pumpkin pancakes, sausages and mustard sauce. The meals were a bit different from usual as all the ingredients in them were grown within the ancient kingdom of Fife, eastern Scotland – home of Gordon Brown, Ian Rankin, Raith Rovers and the Lomond Hills.
The family have joined a small grassroots movement trying to reduce their ecological impact by buying only local food, regardless of season. The Fife diet, as it is known, is an experiment to discover if it is possible to live for a whole year on food produced from one region, and so reduce an individual’s carbon footprint. So far, 19 families have signed up.
The diet is inspired by the 100 Mile diet, which began in Vancouver, Canada, but the distances have been scaled down. In the Canadian version
(21 November 2007)
How Chocolate Can Save the Planet (audio and text)
Joanne Silberner, National Public Radio (NPR)
Many people agree that chocolate is good for the soul, and researchers are finding that chocolate can be good for the body, too. But the environment? How could chocolate help with global climate change?
The answer is found in a little piece of paradise, a patch of rainforest in eastern Brazil. Everywhere you look, something is growing. Orchids nestle in the crooks of trees. There are hundreds of shades of green, and the forest is loud with birds and insects.
Some areas have been thinned out and planted with cacao trees – the source of chocolate. The pods contain the magical beans that Aztecs counted like gold. The cultivated cacao trees grow just a bit higher than a man can reach, and rainforest trees tower over them like something out of Dr. Seuss – some round like lollipops, some flat like a plate.
And here’s the climate connection. Rainforest trees and plants store massive amounts of carbon – keeping it from getting into the air as carbon dioxide.
(19 November 2007)
China inflation up on food costs
BBC
China’s inflation increased in October after shortages pushed food costs higher, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
Annual inflation reached 6.5% in October, up from 6.2% in the previous month. Food prices increased by 17.6% in October.
Despite efforts to stem price rises, October’s total inflation matches that in August, the highest in 11 years.
Analysts say the figures will raise pressure to higher interest rates.
The Chinese government said the latest inflation figures were largely explained by higher food prices – particularly for pork, a key Chinese ingredient, which climbed by nearly 55%.
(13 November 2007)
Win-win situations? Don’t trust them, but…
Bibi van der Zee, The Guardian
How leading a low carbon lifestyle is benefiting her and the kids
—
Before industrialised food kicked in, Scots enjoyed a diet based on kale (every Scotsman had his kale patch), barley, oats (porridge for breakfast is the healthiest start you can possibly have), turnips, butter and cheese – a poor diet but surprisingly well balanced and rich in complex carbohydrates and fibre. Then they were eating white bread, sausages, potatoes, condensed milk, sugar, margarine and jam. More calories, more fat, more protein, but far, far fewer nutrients. By the end of the twentieth century the Scots were the sick men of Europe; eating almost the lowest rates of fruit and vegetables in the world, and doctors were discovering that Scottish babies were being hardwired for obesity by the poor diet of their mothers.
What does the Fife ‘local produce’ Diet, – no tea, coffee, wine or soya – in today’s Guardian, have to do with this?
You may have noticed that, as well as being low-carbon, this is an impressively healthy diet. Pumpkin is a great source of vitamin A; organic beef from cattle who’ve grazed on clover and mixed grasses in the Scottish highlands will be packed with vitamins B6 and B12, as well as minerals like selenium and zinc; cabbage is the perfect vitamin C source which kept sailors from dying of scurvy. And all these nutrient levels will be high
because the food has not travelled far: the quicker you eat it out of the ground the better.
It’s hard not to perceive this as a win-win situation and I’ve noticed these cropping up more and more in my ongoing investigations on your behalf into how to be a goody two shoes with low carbon emissions.
…Win-win situations, I must say, make me suspicious. It doesn’t seem quite right that no one is losing out here – apart from the ready-meal, and car, manufacturers I suppose). So I’m looking out for problems and will report back with them. There must be a flaw in the reasoning here somewhere. This is not how the world, as I have always understood it, really functions…
(21 November 2007)
